Krishnamurti on Listening and Love

 

Krishnamurti:“. . . You can say to a friend, “Don’t resist, don’t think about it, but I am going to talk to you.” “We two are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening.”

David Bohm, (the Physicist)  responds: “Yes”

 

Krishnamurti continues: “I think this is what really takes place. When you were talking to me—I was noticing it—I was not listening to your words so much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not to your words, as you explained and so on. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words, which you use, but to the meaning, to the inward quality of your feeling that you want to communicate to me.”

 

Bohm: “I understand.”

 

Krishnamurti: “That changes me, not all this verbalization. So you can talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind interfering and saying, “Please don’t touch this, leave me alone!” . . .

 

What I am saying is: don’t listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning, because I am terribly interested in the source, as you are. You follow, Sir? I am really interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood--- but to come to that one thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly, but you understand what I mean? . . .

 

But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened but it sees this danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does.

 

Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn’t directly appeal to the conscious.

 

Krishnamurti: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else.”

 

 

From: The Awakening of Intelligence by J. Krishnamurti

 Brockwood Park, October 7, 1972